Popular films can make viewers more or less inclined toward authoritarianism, affecting their political attitudes toward issues such as nationalism, civil liberties, immigration and the military, according to new research by Jeffrey Glas from the University of Georgia, and J. Benjamin Taylor from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
In an experiment with close to 300 subjects, the researchers had one group watch “300,” the epic war film about Spartan warriors fighting off Persian invaders; another group watch “V for Vendetta,” the political thriller about a dissident revolting against a fascist state; and the control group watch “21 Jump Street.” They found that, when compared with control-group participants, subjects who viewed “300” expressed a significantly higher authoritarian disposition, while subjects who viewed “V for Vendetta” expressed a significantly more anti-authoritarian disposition.
Authoritarianism refers to how much people prefer obedience and conformity to authority and norms within groups with which they identify. As the researchers note in their paper, authoritarianism “is not necessarily an individual’s default behavioral setting,” but rather something that can be activated in certain situations and contexts.
Films, Glas and Taylor found, can be one such activator of authoritarianism. And authoritarianism in turn affects viewers’ attitudes on key political questions.
“The entertainment media choices people make have effects on the way they interpret the political world around them,” Taylor, an assistant professor of political science, said. “We think there’s telling evidence here … that entertainment media do affect how people understand the world.”
For consumers of entertainment media, the takeaway from this research is clear, Taylor said: the importance of “being constantly aware that you have to have a critical eye towards the media that you consume” and “to think about what are the messages that are being portrayed, either implicitly or explicitly.”
And because people don’t usually expect entertainment media to influence their politics, they tend to think less critically when watching a movie than when they are, for example, consuming news media or information from a political campaign, Glas said.
The researchers found that those who watched “300” were significantly more likely to think that the United States is better than other countries, that military service should be a prerequisite for citizenship, that immigration to the United States should be curtailed, and to be more disinclined to support protesters’ rights. The opposite was true for those who watched “V for Vendetta.”
“These results show how every day seemingly mundane aspects of American life, such as watching a popular film, can have substantively impactful effects on key latent personality disposition in American politics,” the researchers wrote.
The past 25 years or so have seen authoritarianism become much more aligned with partisanship and political ideology, according to years of survey results from the American National Election Study. Public opinion data, Taylor said, suggests that “there seems to be a segment of the population that is becoming more authoritarian and another segment of the population that is becoming less authoritarian over time. This paper demonstrates that at least one culprit of this polarization is entertainment media.”
If films can activate authoritarianism, should we be worried that governments and the movie industry will produce films to manipulate the political attitudes of an entire population? Not necessarily, the researchers said.
First, it is not known how long the effects last. Authoritarianism is found to be activated immediately after viewing “300,” but the researchers did conduct retests to examine the duration of the activation.
“There may be decay effects, and exposure to other media can result in potential mitigation or amplification of the demonstrated media effects,” they wrote.
And second, people might pick movies that already conform to their mindset, Glas said, so any activation of authoritarianism may lead to more of a reinforcement, rather than outright shifting, of political attitudes.
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